


Bilbao

by orphan_account



Category: Original Work
Genre: Bilbao, F/M, Meet-Cute, Spain, Travel, architecture, hostels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 11:04:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11229633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: They meet in a hostel in the city of Bilbao.





	Bilbao

They met in a hostel in Bilbao. She wasn’t sure why she was there. He thought he was there to write, but in reality he didn’t know why he was there, either.

Her name was Jen, and she was a landscape architect from Santa Barbara, California. He, Diego, was a student of literature from Mexico City.

When she first saw him, he was camped out in the lobby of the hostel, hunched in front of a MacBook Air. She thought he might have been a techie from San Francisco, based on his laptop, his dress, and his demeanor. She noticed him because they were, among the groups of Viennese seventeen-year-olds and Canadian nineteen-year-olds, the two oldest people there. Even the unsmiling guy at the front desk, with his white-guy dreads and his Stone Roses t-shirt, seemed younger than they did. She also noticed him because she thought he was attractive. 

Beach House played in the background, incongruous against the sounds of the hostel lobby. This is the soundtrack to our meet-cute, Jen thought. It was a joke she told herself, as if she had already imagined her future with this man she knew nothing about. And it was a joke because she knew she would never talk to him; she wished she were the kind of person who struck up conversations with compelling strangers in the lobbies of European hostels, but she knew she was not.

Well. That was the moment he looked up from his laptop. He had what seemed like the warmest brown eyes she’d ever seen. He didn’t smile at her when he saw her staring at him, just held her gaze for a beat. And then, as quickly as it had happened, it was she who looked away. 

He, Diego, took in the woman standing at the foot of the stairs. He could tell, immediately, that it was him she was looking at. She looked healthy in a way that was supremely inviting, like she spent time hiking and doing vigorous outdoor activity. She was not too tall, but then neither was he. He wanted to know her. But it was useless — she was just as likely to be checked out and on the road to San Sebastian the very next day.

Jen spent the night drinking a glass of sickly-sweet sangria and people watching. Diego spent the night drinking izarra and not-writing.

* * *

The next morning, as she ate a piece of the thick slices of sweet white bread and margarine the hostel provided as breakfast, Jen struck up a conversation with José, the surly front-desk attendant from the day before who, as it seemed, lived at the hostel. José was not particularly interested in talking to her, but he dutifully answered her questions and offered a brief, negative opinion on the work of Richard Serra that existed at the Guggenheim Bilbao. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

At the same time, Diego was unlocking his laptop from the locker in the room he’d shared with four of the noisy Canadian nineteen-year-olds, and retrieving his passport from where he’d slept with it under his pillow. When he came down the stairs that opened up into the hostel lobby, he saw the girl from the day before, chatting in English with the toolish guy who worked at the hostel’s front desk.

His first thought: Ah, so that’s how it is.

His second thought: So she’s an American.

Diego was not a morning person. Moreover, although he had no claim over the beautiful and healthy-looking girl he’d exchanged eye contact with the day before, he felt an urge to break up her conversation with the toolish receptionist by interjecting, in Spanish, whether or not there was any decent coffee in this neighborhood. 

The would-be Rastafarian gestured simply towards the burnt-smelling hot pot on the crumb-covered table. Diego was, yes, a snob, and no, he did not drink that kind of coffee, particularly not when recovering from fifteen hours’ worth of plane travel. 

To his irritation, or perhaps to his delight, the girl responded, in Spanish, that she knew a place nearby — and would he like to go there with her?

Would he like to go? Well, he might have liked to go alone, but there was no way to say that without seeming ruder than he already had been.

And because he was not a morning person, and because he had a habit of putting his foot in his mouth, the only thing he could think of saying to the girl was: 

“If you speak Spanish, why’d you talk to him in English?”

Jen, who was am morning person and had already been awake for several hours, during which she’d run along the river and back, was not at all irritated by the man’s forthrightness. Instead, she was amused. 

“José’s a Basque nationalist. Even English is preferable.”

They were now outside in sun that seemed to Diego excessively bright, walking down the cobbled steps together. 

“You speak good Spanish. How’d you learn?”

“I’m from California. And I lived in Madrid for a year, when I was eight. You’re Mexican?”

Diego was impressed, he had to admit. And he was also, begrudgingly, impressed by her choice of coffeeshop, which had a zinc-covered bar and speedy Italian espresso machines and smelled like God’s gift to man. He should be polite, he thought. Let her order first. But she just smiled and ushered him ahead of her.

“You need it more, I think.” She was funny, he realized. And she seemed to both tolerate his bullshit and call him out on it all at the same time. The only other person who did that was his older sister, who was, embarrassingly, his closest friend.

As he ordered his coffee, Jen examined the back of his head, this man whose name she still did not know. She still thought he was attractive, and he had a bite to him that made her want to poke and prod and see when he snapped. But he had softness, too, that roundness around the edges that she wanted to unwrap like a bar of chocolate wrapped in gold. 

They sat down from each other at a small table outside on the sidewalk. Suddenly, Jen felt a little shy, like she was on a first date. 

Diego, he felt sheepish, after having knocked back half his triple espresso, for his earlier childish behavior. He didn’t know if it was better to acknowledge it and apologize or to simply pretend as if it had never happened. Something about this girl told him she might be more bothered if he brought it up than if he didn’t. 

They introduced themselves. When he said he was from Mexico City, she said she had been there once, as a teenager, and had been touched, very deeply, by Frida’s blue house.

“But that’s what they all say, right?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “They normally say bad jokes about narcos.”

“So what are you doing here?” she asked.

“Writing a thesis on Roberto Bolaño and violence. I’ve done all the research and the work already. I just need to write the damn thing.” He did not add, but thought, that it was because every time he tried to write this thing, this cumulation of several years’ deep thinking, he became instantly paralyzed.

They paused for a moment, each pretending to sip their espressos, their cups already empty.  

They began to speak about their plans, or as it were, the fact that neither of them really had one. Diego had told himself that he would stay away from home until he had finished, whenever that was. Jen, having just quit her job as an architect for a trendy and greenwashed landscape design firm, ended a two-year relationship with a chain-smoking quebecois named Jean-Luc and moved from the bungalow in Los Feliz they had shared, had nowhere to return to.

“So we are both free,” Diego said.

Jen knew that he did not mean to be suggestive, but she hoped that he did, nonetheless.

“Only for now. You can write from anywhere. At some point, I’ll need a real job, again.”

“You mean you can’d do ecologically-friendly landscape design remotely?” he teased.

“Not exactly. But I can uproot easier than some.”

“Uproot. Hah.” 

Jen smiled. He was cute like that, when he relaxed a little.

“I mean, I have my portfolio online. I’ve done one or two jobs outside of LA, before. But I don’t know how likely I’d be to get hired freelance out here. The earth is different. The seasons, what grows…” She was talking more to herself than she was to him, and corrected her course. “Besides, I couldn’t stay here. Could you?” 

He knew what she meant, which was not whether or not they could bear it. Of course they could. The question was whether or not they were permitted to stay, by forces far beyond their own control.

He shook his head. 

“No. I couldn’t.” They were silent for a moment. “Sometimes I look around, all these people, living their lives here. They seem so carefree.”

“I know what you mean. I was just in Denmark, and it’s even worse. All these healthy, good-looking Nordic people, with their lack of crippling student debt, their healthcare, their enviable socialism.” 

“Their journalists,” he added, “whose bodies don’t turn up in the Sonoran dessert or get dissolved in acid.” He said this, but he smiled. In fact, they were smiling at each other. 

“If you can’t joke, what else do you have?”

It was, by now, eleven o’clock. Diego had forgotten he hated mornings, and had let himself be seduced right into mid-day. 

* * *

They saw each other again, two days later, after lunch time, which in Spain was past three o’clock in the afternoon. Diego told Jen that he had, after they had parted the day before, made a start on his writing and had written a rough draft of one of the chapters in past fifty hours. They decided to share a drink at one of the many bars that littered the main arteries of the city, in a nominal celebration. 

“So what attracted you to Bolaño?” Jen asked, once they were seated and sipping their drinks. She had met other guys his age who were obsessed with Bolaño, just like the ones who were obsessed with David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. Normally, such guys were mostly interested in proving how intellectually capable and-or superior they thought they were. “Look, Ma, I can read a thousand-page book and try to impress girls in bars by talking about it ad nauseum!” 

“Well, I always loved Bolaño when I was younger. I loved _The Savage Detectives_. I made a huge fool of myself trying to emulate that book, like how other guys try to emulate Hunter S. Thompson,” he said. “But I think what’s been most of interest to me is the sense of unsettledness that pervades Latin American literature. It’s so much a reflection of real life. It speaks to me, I don’t know.”

“That’s a good answer,” she said.

“What about you? Do plants speak to you?” 

“In a way, certainly. But I also feel like what I do has almost always been about man conquering nature and bending it to his will more than it’s about listening to the plants, even if that’s how it should be. Like those gardens at English stately homes. Those aren’t about any real communion with nature; they’re about proving that the lord of the manor had the funds to cart in exotic plants and hire the human labor necessary to keep it all in such a state of order.” 

“You should write a paper on that, ‘Order and Disorder in the 19th Century English Garden’.”

“You joke, but sometimes I think that I would like to, you know, write. Or at least get engaged in talking about all this, somehow. It totally surrounds us yet few people hardly stop to think about it. There’s this house here, outside of town, that’s built into the hillside so that the roof is covered with grass. In that case, you’re literally surrounded by plant matter. It’s incredible.”

“Have you been there?”

“Yes, but not on this trip. I went the first time I came to Bilbao, a few years ago. It’s what inspired me to come back.”

“Do you want to go?” he asked.

“Now?”

“Why not? You say it’s close. I’ve been writing for the past two days. I need to see some green.” 

Jen pulled out a creased tourist map from her bag, and with a pen circled an area away from the city center, then gestured up over their heads towards the hills that surrounded Bilbao. 

“It will take over an hour to get their by bus,” she said. “Do you want to go tomorrow, instead?”

* * *

The next day, they met at ten o’clock in the morning in the lobby of the hostel. José still held court at reception, but a new crowd had replaced the Austrians and Canadians from just a few days ago. Now, the lobby was filled with hungover Australians swanning about in last night’s clothes.

Diego and Jen ventured outside, the July sun already bright. They stopped the café, briefly, then at a corner shop and bought crusty bread, manchego, serrano ham, green olives, grapes, a screw-topped bottle of wine. They walked towards the bus stop, taking turns carrying their picnic that strained against the plastic of the flimsy bag.

When the bus arrived at 10:36 am, the only other person on board was an elderly Basque woman.

They spoke to each other naturally, about Diego’s work, about the flowers littering the cobbles, fallen from the trees that lined the street, and the river. They talked spoke about the other places they had traveled in Spain. She: everywhere. He: just Barcelona, several years ago. 

“Why come to Bilbao, then? Didn’t Bolaño live in Madrid, when he lived in Spain?”

He was impressed that she knew that.

“I saw photos of the architecture, somewhere. I think someone I know had been here, when I was a child, and I had been forced to sit through them showing me every picture from their trip. But it made a strong impression on me. There’s something interesting about it, that reminds me of what people in the sixties thought the future would look like, or something.”

“I know what you mean. That’s what I like about this house, that we’re going to. It feels like an aesthetic from another time, but futuristic all the same.”

“Retro-futurism,” he said.

“Exactly. And it always has a sense of optimism. Do you know what I mean? Like it was produced by someone who thought the future would be egalitarian and clean.”

“Versus what it is.” 

“Right. And so often, I wish I could seize that optimism, that hope for the future. But I ask myself if I’m hoping for too much, if it’s too late and I’m too old to feel good about the world.” 

“Sometimes I don’t know if I ever felt good about the world at all.”

They looked out the windows of the bus. Outside was some of the lushest green hill they’d ever seen. They had both been raised in the dun-colored southwest. The green was inviting, beckoning both of them to a lushness they’d never really known. 

When they got off the bus, the driver asked them if they were sure this is where they meant to go. He wasn’t wrong; it was middle-of-nowhereish, at the intersection of two one-lane roads surrounded by lots of green hill. They reassured him, in Spanish, that they knew where they were going. The driver shrugged his shoulders and they stepped out into the midday sun. 

Jen took out the ratty map where she’d circled the spot the day before. The house was about a fifteen minute walk up from where they’d been dropped by the bus. The sky was limpid and bright, and Jen felt overwhelmed by the intense blues and greens of the sky and the hills that surrounded her. Where colors this bright everywhere? It seemed like everywhere else she’d ever been, save Frida’s blue house, had been washed-out variations of the real thing. And this was the real thing. 

“You know,” Diego said. “This makes me feel a little optimistic, if anything does.” He didn’t need to explain himself. 

* * *

They walked the fifteen minutes in mostly silence, too busy taking in their surroundings to speak. Diego felt maybe like he understood romantic poetry, and the natural as the divine. Or something. 

The hills were dotted with houses, and they could see the beginnings of the city down below, but the rolling patch of green they walked along seemed like a different plane, with air that felt cleaner, more wholesome — even if it wasn’t. 

Soon, they found themselves facing the house that Jen had spoken of. She’d been right; it was truly built into a hill, like a hobbit hole designed by a twenty-first century environmentalist. Sod covered the roof, blending seamlessly into the hillside with no indication that the house had been put there by man and not merely born along with the hills that surrounded it, the child of shifting ancient plates, or by God’s hand. 

Two round windows were visible from where they stood, like portholes on an ocean liner, or two drunken eyes. 

“Who lives here?” Diego asked.

“I’m not sure. I think you can rent it by the night, as a sort of tourist attraction. Like the ice hotel.” 

Diego peered into one of the windows, hands cupped against the glass.

“Too dark to see in,” he said. “Although with the view out here, I’d rather be outside than in.” 

Jen was pleased, then. She realized he understood why she liked this place. Not because of the hobbit-hole or the architect that built it or anything like that. But because of the space itself; the fact that someone had come to this divine patch of grass and had said, “I want to live here, but there is no improving on perfection.” 

They sat down on the grassy hump that formed the roof of the house that jutted out overlooking the hills beyond, towards the river, the city, the Golfo de Vizcaya. They took out their cheese, their bread, their ham, their olives, their grapes and ate them. They were silent, transfixed on the horizon and reverential of the day. They twisted open the wine, the cheap screw-topped rioja. They had no glasses, so they passed the bottle back and forth, sharing sips until the view acquired a heady wine-colored haze. They might have leaned back and fallen asleep in the sun; they might have chatted more mindless talk about the city or the view or the places they’d been or the places they were going. It didn’t matter. All that did was when he looked at her, smiled, and told her he was glad they’d come. 

 


End file.
